I. Introduction
An in-depth analysis of the outcome of each Presidential election is a post-election tradition in American politics, and this election has been no different. In fact, this year pundits began to form arguments for the reasons behind Barack Obama's win several weeks before the election was actually held. The reasons offered were myriad: Obama's fundraising advantage, John McCain's choice of Sarah Palin as a running mate, President Bush's record unpopularity, the financial crisis and economic collapse; each one of these has been named as the deciding component of Obama's victory. But a careful look at the facts of this election reveals that no single one of these factors alone caused the outcome to occur as it did. Rather, this election was defined by an overarching narrative, which was contributed to by many of these elements but became far more than just the sum of them. This all-encompassing theme, the leitmotif of the 2008 election, was this: the dichotomy between John McCain as the irascible, hotheaded, uneven candidate versus Barack Obama as the cool, self-possessed, levelheaded one.
II. The Ill-Annoyed vs. the Illinoisan
McCain's irritability had been Capitol Hill legend long before the 2008 election. Colleagues, often speaking anonymously, recount innumerable tirades; McCain famously called a fellow Senator “a shithead,” and when the Senator demanded an apology, McCain responded, “I apologize, but you're still a shithead” (22). The Washingtonian described eight of his most memorable outbursts in a 1997 article that called him “Senator Hothead” (19), and The Arizona Republic published an editorial on what it called his “volcanic” temper (24) in 1999. But the issue, like McCain himself, faded into irrelevance once it became clear that George W. Bush was going to win the 2000 Republican nomination.
However, the question of McCain's temper was quick to rear its head again as soon as the Senator became a serious contender in 2008. In early February, Mitt Romney's campaign pushed out a series of robo-calls questioning what it called McCain's “temperament” (26). The news media quickly seized on this caricature, with headlines describing McCain as “testy” (7), “loosing his cool” (17) and “learning to rein himself in” (25) even before he had officially locked up the nomination. An April 2008 Slate article screamed: “Should we worry about John McCain's temper?” (15). Despite all this, McCain's irascibility did not become a major campaign issue in and of itself. What it did do was become one part of the larger McCain ethos, a nagging reminder in the background as the Senator responded to major crises of the campaign with increasing volatility.
Meanwhile, the tenor of Obama's disposition stood in strong contrast to that of McCain's, even when the two were not campaigning against each other. Pundits noticed and discussed Obama's relaxed demeanor from the beginning of the primary season, although many at first viewed it as a flaw. A New York Times article from October 2007, which described Obama as “project[ing] a relaxed air of confidence,” said that his campaign was encountering “mounting alarm among supporters that his lack of assertiveness has allowed [Hillary Clinton] to dominate the presidential race” (29).
But as the Obama-Clinton race wore on, Obama's unflappability came to be seen as an asset. While the Clinton campaign veered back and forth between different slogans and strategies – she would “Renew the Promise of America”; she was “In to Win”; she was “Working for Change, Working for You”; she was “Ready from Day One” (16) – Obama stayed on a single focused trajectory. By March, when Clinton's perceived inevitability had evaporated, pundits began to see the wisdom in the Obama campaign's steadiness. A March article in The New Republic, called “Cool We Can Believe In,” credited Obama's resistance against attacks to his “laidback, phlegmatic reserve” (6). Perhaps no one summed it up better than Jeff Greenfield of Slate, who compared Obama to Bugs Bunny – and Hillary to Daffy Duck:
Bugs is at ease, laid back, secure, confident. His lidded eyes and sly smile suggest a sense that he knows the way things work. He's onto the cons of his adversaries... Bugs never raises his voice, never flails at his opponents or at the world[...]
Daffy Duck, by contrast, is ever at war with a hostile world. He fumes, he clenches his fists, his eyes bulge, and his entire body tenses with fury... Daffy is constantly frustrated, sometimes by outside forces, sometimes by his own overwrought response to them. (11.)
III. I'm Rubber, You're Glue
If Ronald Reagan was “the Teflon President” – so called because of the way criticisms of his administration failed to stick – Obama may well have been the first “Teflon candidate.” Instead of aggressively attacking, he watched calmly as his opponents attacked him, only to, in many cases, have their attacks blow up in their own faces while failing to do Obama any significant harm.
This technique was on clear display in some of the primary debates with Hillary Clinton. Unlike in his spars with McCain, Obama was not widely regarded as the winner of these debates; his performances were uneven. He often seemed incapable of directly attacking Clinton in an effective manner. Instead, his strongest performances came when he played defense: he coasted along, unflappable, waiting for an opportunity in which he could subtly twist one of Clinton's attacks on him in a manner that directed it back at her. Take, for example, the following exchange, from a February 26th debate in Ohio, in which moderator Tim Russert asks Obama about his endorsement by Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan. Russert has asked Obama if he will reject Farrakhan's endorsement; Obama has answered that he “denounces” Farrakhan's views and statements:
CLINTON: I just want to add something here, because
I faced a similar situation when I ran for the Senate in 2000 in New York...The
Independence Party was under control of people who were anti-Semitic,
anti-Israel, and I made it very clear that I did not want their support. I
rejected it. [...] I'm just saying that you [Russert] asked specifically if he
would reject it, and there's a difference between denouncing and rejecting. [...]
OBAMA: Tim, I have to say, I don't see a difference
between denouncing and rejecting...but, if the word “reject” Senator Clinton
feels is stronger than the word “denounce,” then I'm happy to concede the
point, and I would reject and denounce.
(Audience laughter.)
(30.)
Or take the way Obama reacted when the incendiary statements made by Rev. Jeremiah Wright threatened to completely derail his campaign. Polls taken immediately after Wright's March surfacing showed enormous concern about his remarks among voters, with over a third saying that Obama's relationship with Wright “caused them to have doubts about Obama” (23). The conventional wisdom was that Obama needed to immediately condemn and disown Wright as strongly as possible. But instead of flailing about wildly, Obama kept his cool. He delivered his seminal speech on race, in which he said: “I can no more disown [Rev. Wright] then I can disown the black community [or...] my white grandmother” (30). After the storm had cleared, a CBS poll found that the Wright issue had not put a significant dent in Obama's support (37) – and the results of the election backed that up.
IV. A Game of Vice-Presidential Roulette
Obama's coolness was not an automatic win card, nor was it a strategy that would have won him the election under any circumstances. His laid-back demeanor became crucial to his election night victory only because it enabled him to brilliantly play off his opponents' mistakes. And Obama found in John McCain a perfect temperamental counterpart. McCain had always been irritable and quick to anger, but this election found that characteristic extending from the Senator personally to his entire campaign. More than seeming angry, his campaign seemed impetuous: the Obama campaign was defined by its actions, the McCain campaign by its reactions. While no single one of those reactions was necessarily terrible on its own, their combined effect was to make the campaign – and McCain himself – seem completely unstable.
The first clear sign of this instability was the choice of Sarah Palin as the Vice-Presidential candidate. From the beginning of the race, McCain had stressed his experience and Obama's lack of it, especially in military and foreign policy areas. His campaign called Obama “naïve” (33) and said that he had “no experience in national security or warfare” (18); it pointed repeatedly to the fact that he had served only one term in the Senate, whereas McCain had been a Senator since 1987 (20). Placing Palin on the ticket completely destroyed this advantage, forcing the campaign to awkwardly argue that Palin's limited experience was somehow more sufficient than Obama's. Even McCain's surrogates seemed to struggle with this task, citing Palin's experience as a mom (1) or her time as Mayor of Wasilla (12). Palin herself was widely mocked for citing Alaska's proximity to Russia as an aspect of her national security credentials (21).
But it wasn't Palin herself that sunk the McCain campaign. After all, the first George Bush won the 1988 election despite the similar down-ticket drag of Dan Quayle. Instead, the Palin pick hurt McCain because it caused voters to question his judgment. The prevailing thought was: if he made such a poor choice for his Vice-Presidential nominee, what other poor choices might he make once elected? The Obama campaign wisely seized on this line of attack instead of going after Palin directly, and the news media followed suit. Newsweek's Howard Fineman was just one of many when he said, on an October 2nd MSNBC broadcast, “What's on trial here is John McCain's judgment” (13).
V. A Chicken With His Head Cut Off
The next piece of evidence in the trial against McCain's judgment came with his horribly botched reaction to the financial crisis. At first, his campaign suspension seemed like the kind of brilliant political move that might result in a huge payoff. McCain pushed for a postponement of the first debate and rushed to Washington like a superhero sweeping in at the last minute to save the day. Obama, keeping his characteristic cool, offered pronouncements from the side but largely stayed out of Congress' way, and made it clear that he still planned to show up at the debate.
If the bailout bill had passed on the first vote, McCain's strategy might have worked. Instead, it failed – blocked by McCain's own Republican colleagues – and McCain looked ridiculous. He had claimed that he needed to pause campaigning so that he could focus on his work as a legislator, but the failure of the bailout made his work as a legislator seem worthless and his entire decision-making process seem suspect. Pennsylvania Governor and Obama supporter Ed Rendell said that McCain had “looked like a chicken with his head cut off” (14) in his response to the crisis, an image that only became more fitting as McCain returned, tail between his legs, to attend the first debate as scheduled. His advisors had “said McCain would stay in Washington and skip the debate unless a financial agreement was in place by Friday” (32); now the Senator was directly contradicting the position of his own campaign, and seeming all the more erratic in the process. Pundit Andrew Sullivan, continuing the trend of cartoon character comparisons, drew this analogy:
“Watching [Obama's] autumn
fight with McCain reminds me of the Wile E. Coyote and Road Runner cartoons.
Every elaborate attempt to blow Obama up leaves his opponents with sooty faces
and a trail of smoke rising from the tops of their heads...McCain made a huge
splash of 'suspending' his campaign and rushed back to Washington to talk his
own party into backing the bailout. It refused, the bailout sank for a week and
McCain's campaign was just as suddenly unsuspended...Wile E Coyote blew himself
up again. Meanwhile, Obama purred 'beep, beep' and raced down the home
stretch.”
(36.)
It wasn't just McCain's campaign suspension that made his economic policy seem haphazardly put together. He famously said that “the fundamentals of our economy are strong” (5), then was forced to backtrack, claiming that the fundamentals he had been referring to were the drive of the American workforce. At a September 18 rally, he angrily promised to fire the chairman of the SEC if elected, only to later discover that the President lacks the power to do so.
By September 22, a CNN poll showed voters strongly favored Obama “to display good judgment in an economic crisis” (8); after the first debate, in which McCain performed acceptably in some ways but failed to convincingly justify his economic approach, a poll by the Pew Research Center found that a whopping 41% of registered voters viewed McCain as “having poor judgment” (34).
VI. Going Down with the Ship
As McCain's standing in the polls dipped lower and lower, his actions only became more and more desperate. During the final weeks, he seemed to simply be trying anything and everything to unseat Obama, but in the process his campaign became the epitome of a chimera, a beast of incongruous and at times contradictory parts. He was adamant about not using Rev. Wright as a wedge issue, yet he released ad after ad tying Obama to former Weather Undergound member Bill Ayers. He claimed he would focus only on the issues during the last debate, yet repeatedly invoked Obama's thin ties to the ACORN voter-registration group. He tried to invoke fear by repeatedly asking, “Who is the real Barack Obama?” (10), only to cautiously backtrack as some of his over-aggressive supporters made violent threats towards Obama at rallies (39). MSNBC's Rachel Maddow called it a “kitchen sink strategy”: throw everything in, and see what works (27).
Meanwhile, some of Sarah Palin's speeches began contradicting the official positions of the McCain campaign, causing some analysts to speculate that she was “going rogue” (4). And McCain's sneers and irritated looks – not to mention the time he infamously called Obama “that one” – became the subject of several news stories (9). McCain's strategy solidified somewhat with a last-ditch effort to portray Obama as a borderline socialist, invoking Joe the Plumber and claiming that Obama would “spread the wealth around” (35), but this line of attack failed to stick, perhaps because accusations of socialism seemed meaningless when McCain himself supported the financial bailout. During the final days of the campaign, as commentators all but guaranteed an Obama win, it simply did not look like the left hand of the McCain campaign knew what the right was doing.
VII. Conclusion
There is a widely repeated political theory, established by LA Times columnist Peter Wolson (40), that attempts to understand American politics by framing the Republican-Democrat divide as a divide in the American psyche: the Democrats play the roll of a nurturing mother figure opposite the Republicans' strong father figure. This analogy gibes with the conventional wisdom that Democrats win elections when the American people are focused on domestic issues, like health care or poverty – issues that, if the country is to be viewed as a stereotypical nuclear family, fall under the province of the mother – whereas Republicans win when the country is focused on foreign policy and defense, which are stereotypically masculine issues.
But there was no father figure in this election. If Obama was the comforting, reassuring mother of the American family, then McCain was more like the senile Great Uncle, the guy who often gets lost in his own home and regularly tells long, rambling stories that don't quite make sense. Obama set his course – change – at the beginning of his campaign, and never strayed from that path; McCain ran first as the experience candidate, then tried to awkwardly graft Obama's message on to his own with Palin and the so-called “team of mavericks.” Obama kept his cool when the financial crisis hit; McCain panicked, issued a string of incoherent pronouncements, and dashed to Washington and back in a spectacular flameout.
With so many things going wrong in the country – an October 14th New York Times/CBS News poll found a record 89% of respondents thinking the country was on the wrong track (38) – Americans wanted a steady hand at the tiller. Despite some strengths – and he did have many strengths as a candidate – John McCain did not seem like that steady hand. His words and actions seemed inconsistent when viewed as a whole, and he ran a campaign that was borderline schizophrenic in its disorganization. In short, he simply did not seem like he knew what he was doing.
For all his faults, Barack Obama always acted like he knew what he was doing. His words and actions followed a steady narrative; his campaign was disciplined and always on message. Whether it was strategy or his true nature, Obama behaved like dependable leader the American people wanted, and that, more than anything else, is what got him elected.
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